Barbarians at the Gate

#1 New York Times bestseller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco at the hands of a massive leveraged buyout from investment firm KKR. A book that stormed both the bestseller list and the public imagination, a book that created a genre of its own, and a book that gets at the heart of 1980s Wall Street and the culture it helped define, Barbarians at the Gate is a modern classic—a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a rollicking true story of corporate derring-do and financial swordsmanship. The fight to control RJR Nabisco during October and November of 1988 was more than just the largest corporate takeover in Wall Street history. Marked by brazen displays of ego not seen in American business for decades, it became the high point of a new gilded age and its repercussions are still being felt. The tale remains the ultimate story of greed and glory—a real-life corporate drama and a cast of characters that determined the course of global business and redefined how deals would be done and fortunes made in the decades to come. Barbarians at the Gate is the gripping account of these two frenzied months, of powerful deal makers and publicity flaks, of an old-line industrial powerhouse (home of such familiar products as Oreos and Camels) that became the victim of the ruthless and rapacious style of high-stakes finance in the 1980s. As reporters for The Wall Street Journal, Burrough and Helyar had extensive access to all the characters in this M&A drama.

Publisher description via Google Books.